The 3 words that will motivate your employees

Healthcare leaders understand that the ability to drive an organization toward its goals lies in the ability of each level of management to motivate the level below it — to empower others to perform certain behaviors or meet certain benchmarks.
But how does a manager motivate?
Most research suggests that the answer lies in figuring out what external and intrinsic motivators are impactful for your employees.
But what motivators are impactful?
Answering that question is also complicated.
Management guru Daniel Pink, for example, has argued that external motivators aren’t useful in driving employee performance. However, anyone who has offered a financial incentive to employees for meeting a certain benchmark and then sees improved performance on that benchmark would question that assertion. While we don’t want to pay employees to perform (we want them to do it without dangling money or awards), many of us have seen it work.
Is providing external motivators bad? Does it take away from the more powerful instrisic motivators we so desire in our employees?
According to employee engagement expert Bill Sims, Jr., providing external and internal motivators aren’t mutually exclusive. In an interview with me earlier this year, he discussed the idea:
“Pink believes that it will somehow rob you of your internal satisfaction for doing the job. If we applied his logic across the board, students should never be awarded college scholarships (because that will rob them of their desire to study). Brain surgeons should make no more than dental technicians, since they are robbed of their internal joy by being compensated for performance. The Pink logic doesn’t really hold up here. The studies he quotes, many of them the work of Edward Deci, have been examined by other psychologists who have found that external positive reinforcement does increase performance, and it does so without any degradation of internal drive or motivation.”
One might surmise then that managers can best motivate by tapping into both external and internal motivators.
How do we tap into intrinsic motivators? External ones are easy — give incentive money, create employee rewards, offer praise. Tapping into internal motivators is less cut and dried.However, Heidi Grant Halvorson, PhD, associate director for the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School, suggests one element of intrinsic motivation is a concept called “relatedness.” In a column for Harvard Business Review, she writes:
“The feeling of working together has indeed been shown to predict greater motivation, particularly intrinsic motivation, that magical elixir of interest, enjoyment, and engagement that brings with it the very best performance.”
How does a manager create relatedness?